Steve and I have been trying to set this up for a couple of weeks now. We need some new headshots for a few people at my company, just casual, chilling out shots of some guys at a startup, photos at their desks, against a wall, something like that.  Easy stuff, don’t need a bunch of lights, but I’ll grab my 6″ soft box just in case.  Turns out what he wanted was more stylized photos against a black background.  If I had my full lighting kit I’d have set up a beauty dish, maybe a large soft box or 60″ soft lighter II, a rim light to give a bit of definition, setup my backdrop stand and my 5×7 black popup background.

But I didn’t have any of that.  Just a flash and a soft box.  What to do? You still want to make them…. sexy…

Well, rock it out and kick ass in 12 minutes.  What you see below are the fine folks who got their photos taken.  The background is the black door to one of the side offices.  The light is the little soft box just out of frame just above and slightly to the camera left. There’s a fill board being held just out of frame against their chests.  No I’m lying now, it wasn’t a fill board it was a white shelve out of the storage closet.

The subjects were given a combination of my best imitations of Peter Hurley (“squinch“, “jawline“) and Tyra Banks (“smile“) and they pulled off the look really well. After we wanted some “fun” shots to contrast the start faces, and they performed admirably.

All the photos for all the subjects (6 in total) were in and done in 12 minutes!

Remember, you can do a big production with lights, camera, and craziness (I’ll be doing that this Friday morning actually, keep in touch to hear more about that), or you can work nice, simple, and get some great character photos like these!